A visual demonstration of Ball Pivoting Algorithm

This project is a visualization of BPA, it is written based on learnopenGL's examples and an exemplary C++ implementation of the ball pivoting algorithm for creating triangle meshes from point clouds.

Main Features

• read in ply files (must include point normals)
• do BPA and reconstruct surfaces
• render the reconstruction process and result

Build

CMakeLists.txt file is provided. CMakeLists.txt is the default building way which uses libglad.a and libglfw3.a. This way might fail when not using windows 11 and minGW64. CMakeLists_with_glad_glfw.txt is another building way, which build glad and glfw at the same time. This will create a much bigger folder and is avaliable under any platform(I hope so). Here is an example of building the exe:

For windows 11 with mingw64 compiler and cmake:

under project folder,

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ..
cmake --build .

noticing that the exe file should be put in this way:

BPA_visual
  ├─build
  │  BPA_visual.exe
  ├─input
  │  └─xxx
  ├─output
  │  └─xxx
  ├─xxx
  │  └─xxx

parameter setting

The radius of the ball under bunny model should be around 0.001 - 0.005. Too small will make the result empty and cause segmentation fault. Too big will make the program low efficient and won't terminate. I recommend r = 0.001.

Control

• rotation: move mouse

• change fov: mouse wheel

• forward/left/backward/right: w/a/s/d

• increase reconstruction speed: space

Reference

https://learnopengl.com/

https://github.com/bernhardmgruber/bpa